Tuesday, November 14, 2006

[november 14th, 2006]

It is in the ability to fail oneself that a person can truly find strength. In that failure are pieces of ourselves, spices of our personality, our emotions, our energies, and our motives, and when it confronts us we can be overwhelmed. When faced with this turbulent kaleidoscope of ourselves, the ability to overcome the discomfort, the doubt, the defense we’ve spent years building to achieve a superficial infallibility, to allow ourselves to admit who we are and why we fail, can be the single greatest step in gaining strength. And this strength does not render us ‘untouchable’ or ‘unbreakable’, the reality is quite the opposite. To gain that strength of person is to leave one defenseless, open, even happy, adjectives society would associate with what is seen as the negative quality of vulnerability. Yet to fail is to learn and in learning we build strength. Like any lesson, it takes time and effort and the commitment to let this new knowledge in and become part of what shapes us. Without failure, we fail to learn about who we are, fail to recognize, address, and understand what it is that makes us ‘us’.

Wednesday, November 08, 2006

'ya...well....you shoulda seen da otha cat...'



cus it was totally unharmed haha.
after a jam-packed weekend of cat and house sitting , the score was cat one, me zero

[unless you count a face full of cat-claw fury...oh ya, and black eye from where it BIT me...as point-age...in that case i KICKED this weekend lol]

I DID borrow/steal mikes camera to take some pics of the water festival so those WILL be posted. [this ev-en-ing]

in the meantime, feel free to chuckle over these lovely pics of my cat-tagged face! it was painfully hilarious, just fingers crossed humans cant pick up feline HIV [dont worry mom, i'm at least 80 % certain that we cant.....i think.....jk]

Thursday, November 02, 2006

2months

the sky just turned purple all over.

6 minutes ago it was entirely pink. no clouds. just soft, dusty pink. i'm sure if i'd gone outside it would have reflected just as colourfully off the dust that has settled rather permanently onto every exposed surface of my body [...and other areas one could consider 'less' exposed....]

yesterday was our two month mark. i'm 1/4 of the way into this. made me realise how much more i could be doing. i've got TIME and i'm damn lucky to have it. i need to start using it more effectively.

come november 15th at least i'll be able to get my head firmly out of north america for a while. well, at least for 4 weeks, when the acceptance/rejection letter will grace my parents mailbox. me, i will be in lao, sleeping in treehouses connected by ziplines set in the canopy of a rainforest near the thai border. so fingers crossed that its one of those yes/no sort of letters lol. though i guess nothing is truly isolated anylonger, praise ye o internet land.

water festival is this weekend. jen and i are set with keys we've been armed with to house/cat sit for the next week. stories and past experiences keep getting increasingly ridiculous/alarming, all corroborating on the undeniable fact that phnom penh is total madness every year when the boat races come to tonle sap.

sorry for the lack of photos, my camera is out of commission. but i will get it fixed and there will be photos, absolutely.

much peace, much love,
el.